Large shareholders, monitoring, and ownership dynamics: Toward pure managerial firms?

We study ownership dynamics when the manager and the large shareholder, both risk neutral, simultaneously choose effort and monitoring level respectively to serve their non-congruent interests.We show that there is a wedge between the valuation of shares by atomistic shareholders and the large shareholder's valuation. At the Markov-perfect equilibrium, the large shareholder divests her shares. If the incongruence of their interests is mild, divestment is drastic: all her shares are sold immediately. If their interests diverge sharply, the divestment is gradual in order to prevent a sharp fall in share price. In the limit the firm becomes purely managerial.